It's interesting to see how the language changed over time from "foreign born" to illegal immigrant depending on who was doing the immigrating: https://books.g

It's interesting to see how the language changed over time from "foreign born" to illegal immigrant depending on who was doing the immigrating: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=illegal+immigrant%2Cundocumented+worker%2Cmigrant+worker%2Cillegal+alien%2Cforeign+born%2Casylum+seeker%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=2 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=illegal+immigr... Look at the amount of legal immigration: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/annual-number-of-us-legal-permanent-residents https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann... There have been plenty of people who have been in this country without appropriate paperwork historically - they were never called illegals (see above). In fact even now people make differentiations between "visa overstayers" and people who snuck across the border, even though both are technically illegal aliens. I think you don't have to go far to see the implications.